Ask Mick LaSalle:
Which movie critics do you like?
Yo Mickey: If you weren’t in the movie “curation business,” and looked to professional movie reviewers for advice on what to see and not see, which writers would that be?
Nicole Heslip, San Anselmo Yo Nicole: I don’t know. I can tell you who’s good — Peter Hartlaub, Ann Hornaday, Kenneth Turan. And I can tell you the living writers on film whose books I read — Scott Eyman, Molly Haskell, David Thomson, Peter Cowie. But as for what I’d be reading if I weren’t a critic, I have no idea. If I ceased to be a critic, I don’t know what I’d read. I might stop reading criticism altogether, out of sadness that the entire practice didn’t collapse the minute I stopped doing it. I might want to move on and never think of it again. Or I might want to read lots of reviews and feel good (or bad) that I didn’t have to write them. Or — this is really possible — I might start out feeling one way and then switch to feeling another way, and keep switching back and forth. In any case, having done this for so long, I can’t imagine looking at movie reviews for the opinions they contain. To me, they’re pieces of writing. I can’t look at them any other way. Dear Mick: I am a big fan of your column and usually agree with your answers to the questions people ask you. However I am puzzled as to why I almost always disagree with you on your movie reviews. If you liked it, I’m certain to hate it and vice versa.
Micheline LaMont, Oakland Dear Micheline: You don’t do yourself enough credit. There may be vistas of expanded understanding and insight that lie before you, so that in the future you might use my reviews, not as some inverse consumer guide, but as a standard against which to measure your own progress. However, I’m suspicious of this whole I hate it/you love it business. Let’s test this. I’ll give you a list of 10 movies that I definitely hate, and you write back to me after you’ve seen all of them — or at the point that you’ve given up trying: “After Earth,” “Australia,” “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” “The Last Airbender,” “Nymphomaniac: Vol. I,” Carlo Carlei’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” “Swiss Army Man,” “Walt & El Grupo,” and “What’s Your Number?” Oh, the fun, the fun, the hours of fun ahead. Dear Mr. Mick: I’ve tried to come up with the 10 coolest people in my lifetime that were in the arts, a very hard job, but here are mine: Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Smokey Robinson, Daryl Hall, Al Pacino, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, John Lennon, Steve McQueen and Marilyn Monroe. What’s yours?
Robert Freud Bastin, Petaluma Dear Mr. Robert: To be honest, I think I’m beyond the realm of knowing what’s cool or caring about it, except in a retrospective way. It’s like when you’re a teenager. You listen to music that speaks to you as a member of a generation, and that seems really important. That’s your point of identification. But then you get older and prefer music that speaks to you as a member of the human race, and that’s less flashy, but deeper. So I have a vague concept that, maybe Chloe Sevigny, Kate Moss, Jennifer Lawrence, Lady Gaga and Aubrey Plaza are cool, but the coolness doesn’t speak to me in the way that the 20th century coolness of Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Steve McQueen, Prince, Bruce Lee, Monica Vitti, Sade or Catherine Deneuve once did. Actually, Deneuve is a great example of the proper approach to this cool thing. When she was young, she was very cool. Now she’s just fun to be around. She’s nice. She’s not hiding anything. That’s what I notice now. If somebody is totally themselves, not being a phony, not being a pushover, and yet nice — if you can manage that, then you’re doing something, and who cares about who’s cool?